For the beleaguered small countries of Europe, the euro crisis has become a form of torture, a death by a thousand cuts.

The Portuguese government stumbles on but was weakened by the resignation of the finance minister and the foreign minister.

The former admitted that he had underestimated how deeply his spending cuts would bite into overall economic output and therefore of tax revenues. The latter leads one of the parties in the governing coalition and in his departing speech said that the austerity imposed by Portugal’s eurozone partners couldn’t go on.